Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Baptist denomination, the largest Protestant Christian body in the United States, and the second-largest Christian church in America (after Catholicism). The convention was founded in 1845 as the result of a split from anti-slavery northern Baptists, who argued that slaveholders could not serve as missionaries. The African Methodist Episcopal Church would split from the Southern Baptists, leaving the Southern Baptists as a white-majority church; in 1990, only 5% of congregants were not white. The Southern Baptist Convention is an evangelical Christian body, and it believes in the full immersion of believers in water for their baptism, rejecting infant baptism.